When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he quickly gutted the social media platform to its core operations, dispensing with anything he saw as wasteful or superfluous. Now, Donald Trump wants him to do the same to the US government.
The world’s richest man was named this week alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a former rival of Trump’s for the Republican nomination, to head up a project with a mandate to “dismantle government bureaucracy”.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym “Doge” is a nod to a Musk-endorsed cryptocurrency, is one that the multibillionaire had publicly lobbied to lead. Having become one of Trump’s highest profile supporters, he pledged at an October rally to rip $2tn out of the annual federal budget.
The project catapults Musk into the heart of the new administration, and tasks him with a central plank of Trump’s agenda: the transformation of the machinery of the state. The president-elect referred to Doge as “the Manhattan Project of our time”, a reference to the 1940s project to develop an atomic bomb.
For those who have worked with him, Musk’s relish at the opportunity to reorganise government is a result of a growing frustration at the limitations placed on his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.
“As his companies got larger and larger, he had more and more government interactions that got more and more annoying,” says one Tesla executive. The serial entrepreneur would “complain about [local regulations in California] constantly . . . but I do think the real thing was SpaceX . . . that was the big chafe for him”.
“The absurd regulations get worse every year,” the billionaire wrote on X on Wednesday. Saying it takes government more time to complete paperwork than it takes SpaceX to build a rocket, he added: “Unless we push back, everything will become illegal.”
Musk’s own businesses have regularly run afoul of the very rules he will be in position to attack in his new ‘tsar’ position
Ethics experts note that Musk will now potentially have the ability to strip out regulations that affect his own companies, as well as protect his entities’ billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts. His critics fear that he will use the position to go after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has been a thorn in Tesla’s side, and the Federal Trade Commission, which frustrated his takeover of Twitter in 2022.